Calibre doesn't copy umlauts for collection on Tolino Vision 4HD

[Wimi_Bussard]

The Tolino Vision 4HD isn't very flexible when it comes to organizing your books with calibre. In fact, you cannot access its collections at all with calibre. Instead, the reader creates the collection based on the folder structure on the reader. Collections are a bunch of books that you have put in certain groups, e.g. genre-groups (fantasy, sci-fi etc.) or series-group (Harry Potter series). So, basically, calibre creates folders (which contain books) on the reader, you disconnect the cable and the reader starts to import the folder structure and creates the collections based on the read folder structure.

Inconveniently as it is, this works fine and all, but it seems that Calibre doesn't copy umlauts and special chars to the reader when creating the folders, like "?", "!" and other characters. An "ä" turns to "a", a "ö" turns to "o" etc. Special characters like exclamation marks will turn into underscores "_". Hence, the reader will create collections without these umlauts and I have to rename it manually on the reader, which is kinda annoying.

Is this a bug of the Tolino plugin? If so, can I fix this somehow?

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

No you cannot fix it. It is deliberate as leaving special characters in filenames is highly brittle given that different OSes, filesystems, devices etc all have different sets of restrictions on what they allow in filenames.

[Wimi_Bussard]

I understand the compatibility problem, but as it's a German eReader and this specific reader is using the folder structure for creating the collections in the reader, I think that Calibre should be able to copy the umlauts, too.

For tolino devices (at least for the Vision 4 HD) IMHO it is recommendable to have folders which contain umlauts, at least when you have set German as your language. For the sake of compatibility, there could be a legacy mode/non-umlauts mode (non German mode).

As it is now, for this particular problem, Calibre doesn't work well with the tolino readers (though I must say that it's mostly the fault of the tolino readers method to handle collections).

PS: I haven't changed the language of the reader to e.g. English yet to test this, but umlauts definitely work for the tolino (with set language as "German") when changing the folder names. The tolino then creates the collections with umlauts as it is in the folder name.

[theducks]

t is not your DEVICE that is incompatible. It is an effort to make calibre work with all devices without knowing wich few do worrk.

KISS
Avoid GENERALLY known problems.
Today you have a Tolino. What will you have connected tomorrow?

[Wimi_Bussard]

I thought, calibre handles different devices in a different way. Or is the copying function the same for all devices? If so, then there's nothing we can do and compatibility is more important .

[davidfor]

A device driver can override the filename construction for the device in a few of ways. You can create your own driver to override the built-in drivers or run from source and make you changes there. Having this built into calibre is a problem, as while the Tolino is a German ereader, it is sold outside the country and this might cause problems elsewhere.

[Wimi_Bussard]

Thanks for the response! @all

[Divingduck]

You can use save to disc as workaround.